Jacques Bergier

Jacques Bergier (bɛʁʒje; maybe born Yakov Mikhailovich Berger (Я́ков Миха́йлович Бéргер); Odessa, Paris, 23 November 1978) was a chemical engineer, member of the French-resistance, spy, journalist and writer. He co-wrote the best-seller The Morning of the Magicians with Louis Pauwels as a work of "fantastic realism" (a term coined by the authors). Yakov Mikhailovich Berger, who later adopted the name Jacques Bergier, was born in Odessa in 1912. In his autobiography, Je ne suis pas une légende ("I am Not a Legend"), Bergier tells that his surname was a transliteration error from a Polish official that turned his surname into "Bergier" (in Russian "e" is read "ye"). "Jacques" is the French for Yakov in Russian and Hebrew. Mikhail Berger, his father, was a Jewish wholesale grocer and his mother, Etlia Krzeminiecka, was a former revolutionary. A grand-uncle of his was a miraculous rabbi and in his autobiography, Bergier says he was a cousin of nuclear physicist George Gamow and of a certain Anatoly, a member of the firing squad that shot Tsar Nicholas II. He was a gifted child: in his autobiography he said that at age two he read his first newspaper and at four he could easily read Russian, French and Hebrew. He was a speed reader (until the end of his life he could read four to ten books per day) and had an eidetic memory. He was a vivacious child, and he told fabulous sounding stories of discussing strategy with generals as well as talking with tramps, prostitutes, political activists and businessmen in the streets of Odessa. He never went to school but had private tutors. In 1920 the Russian Civil War forced the Berger family to take refuge in Etlia's homeland in Krzemeiniec, Northwestern Ukraine. Young Yakov Mikhailovich went to a Talmudic school and he became enthralled with the study of the Kabbalah and its mysteries. Besides that he studied mathematics, physics, German and English. He read everything he could lay hands on, but his favourite reading was science fiction. In 1925 the family moved to France.